Tuesday, January 29, 2013

I Got Yer Coolest Catholic Blogs Right Here

We're so underground that we didn't even hear of the Sheenazing Blogger Awards (that's as in Fulton Sheen) until someone notified us that we'd been nominated for Coolest Blogger(s): "Reading this blog makes you awesome just by association." Lots of pressure there, but we cool.

It may be that I'm entirely out of the loop, but I didn't recognize many of the bloggers nominated for almost anything. The Catholic interwebs have changed since we first started writing almost eight years ago, and many blogs have risen and fallen in the meantime. I also hadn't realized that Catholic blogging had fractured so thoroughly into gender enclaves -- seems like it used to be that most people read most people, or as least that's how it was in the circles in which we ran.

And so, speaking of the circles in which we run, we've quickly thrown together our own list of Coolest Catholic blogs. They may not be the biggest or the loudest, but reading these guys definitely "makes you awesome just by association."

I have never had a blog but have been reading them for, I guess, 9 years. I have come to the conclusion in the last year that I am officially getting old.

I used to read all the young Catholic blogs written by people around my age. We were all hip and with it, right? And now I still read a lot of those same blogs, but in the past year it seems a new crop has sprung.

The authors of these new blogs are not my age. Some of them are a decade younger than I am. I feel codgerly reading their youthful enthusiasm. I'm only 35, but I think I may be getting old now. :)

You guys are mere dilettantes in the age department. Come back and talk to me when you have as much silver hair as I do -- which will be never, because I come from a family which goes gray early and often, and I've only ever met one person my age who could outdo me in the silver department (thinking of you, John Henry). I have more gray hair than my lovely mother-in-law, and she raised Darwin.

I don't mind, though I hope the statement it makes to the young upstarts is, "You better recognize," rather than, "Dang, she looks OLD."

I've began reading Catholic blogs at the time of Pope John Paul II's death and the selection of Pope Benedict XVI. The list of Catholic bloggers seemed long then (I'm thinking, for example, of the blogroll on Amy Welborn's then-blog) but was so much more easily manageable than today's explosion of Catholicism in the blogosphere! (and I'm older, no doubt, than any commenter here, and happy to find so much wisdom in the writing of bloggers half my age!)

Contributors

Reading

With the Catholic News sites discussing the Vatican's move to reform the LCWR, I pulled this slim volume written back in 1986 off the shelf to re-read. It's a quick and amusing read: a satirical view of the breakdown and renewal of reli...

I'd never read any Henry James before, though I did see the Nicole Kidman movie adaptation of Portrait of a Lady some years ago because... well, because it was a costume drama with Nicole Kidman in it.
This was one of those novels I ...

If you, like me, have been reared on tales of the second World War as the just and virtuous struggle of the "greatest generation", Evelyn Waugh's arch novels (based loosely on his own war experiences) are an important and darkly enjoyabl...

This was the first time in some years that I've re-read this Austen novel, one of the quieter and shorter ones, but one which has ranked among my favorites. It was striking me, on this pass, that it rather shows the effects of having be...